When sailors Jeremy Smith and Tony McJonston aboard the USS Harry S. Truman were collecting Foreign Object Debris (FOD) in the cockpit of a fighter jet, they found something quite unexpected: a cute little screech owl!

Gorman and the flight deck Medical team nursed the owl, or “FOD” as Flight Deck Control liked to call him, back to health. One of Smith’s main jobs is to collect FOD from inside the cockpit of the airplanes, which is why the bird was caught instead of scared away.

“The main reason I grabbed it instead of shooing it away was that I was afraid it would fly into the cockpit of another jet,” said Smith.

If the bird had stayed hidden in the cockpit, then panicked during take off, it may have caused a serious problem for the pilot. “If this owl was hiding in a cockpit while a jet was on the catapult. It could possibly bring a jet down if the pilot freaks out because an owl is flying around in his cockpit,” said Smith.

i just want to know how it got there in the first place.second the cockpit is a very, very confined space. some starts to fly in this, where nothing is never suppose to--that is not a scenerio they teach you to deal with. a certain portion of pilots will fail to handle the issue. top gun marine pilots -would no even flinch an eyelid!no i have no tom cruise crush, my cousin lived the movie, and ended up teaching.

If *I* were flying a billion dollars of jet and found that an owl was flying around me and crapping in my hair, I would, in fact, scream like a little girl. I can totally see that freaking someone out.

For some reason I cannot see a fighter pilot "freaking out" because a bird was inside the cock pit. Would the owl have caused chaos on the flight? Maybe. Would the chaos be because the pilot lost control while screaming like a little girl? I just can't go there.